Let's Go Outside...

In honour of the sun coming out and actually staying out for more than a couple of hours we've been making our outside area as pretty as possible.  We already have our plants, and our first flower, but we wanted to make the space more inviting, seeing as we'll be spending a lot of time out there now summer's begun.

The first flower of summer, ain't she purty!

We had ummed and ahhed over what to do about the concrete floor since we bought the flat.  It's nothing horrific to live with, but it does have a weird large paint stain that's sort of indented into the concrete (no idea how it happened) so it's a wee bit unsightly.

 My feet are totally there for size reference, 

not because I can't take photos properly.  Honest.

Our first thought was Astroturf; my parents had it in their back garden when I was very little, and our upstairs neighbour actually has it on his balcony now and it looks pretty cool.  We had looked into it a few years ago, but it was too expensive for what we wanted to pay back then, and despite hunting on ebay for a few weeks we couldn't find any cheap offcuts that would fit our quite large balcony (it's 4.25m by 1.15m (14' by 3'9" in old money).

At our recent trip to the garden centre we had seen samples of Astroturf, but we decided the one that we liked (i.e. the cheapest one that didn't just look like shredded green plastic bags) was still too expensive at around £25 per square metre (we'd need at least 5 square metres, and it would probably have joins  somewhere due to the long, thin shape of our balcony).

Then, a few weeks ago I saw a picture on Pinterest of Platta flooring tiles from Ikea, and fell in love.  I spoke to Kevin about it and he loved the flooring too, but when we I did some calculations on how much it would cost we I worked it out to be around £280, far too much for us to pay.

 Pic from ikea.com

The only other option that we could think of was to paint the floor dark green and hope that that would make it look at least a bit nicer than the concrete, but Kevin really wasn't keen on the idea, and after mulling it over he decided that we should spend the money and get the Platta flooring, seeing as when we move we can just take it with us and reuse it.

So we did some more calculations, and learnt a very important lesson: always do your calculations at least twice, especially if you're us me.  It turned out our my original calculations were far from correct and that we'd actually only need 5 or 6 packs at £16.99 to cover the whole balcony.  Huzzah!  So yesterday we zoomed off to Ikea and picked up 5 packets, which we laid yesterday afternoon.  It took us around an hour and half, and an hour of that was sweeping the balcony and moving the plants and potting shelves around, with another 20 minutes cutting some of the tiles to fit.  All in all, the actual laying the tiles only took around 10 minutes!  We had to go back today for an extra pack to finish off the edges, but that only took another 10 minutes of cutting tiles when we got back.

The flooring tiles look like this on top:

and like this underneath:

and just clip together like this:

Can you see where the little pegs just fit in the holes?  It's as easy as that.

Our balcony is exactly 3 1/2 tiles wide so we had to cut some tiles in half and snip some of the joining pieces off the edges for a snug fit.  It says on the instructions to use a saw to cut the tiles, but I tried a pair of secateurs to snip through the plastic and they worked perfectly, so we just did them that way.

Anyway, without further ado, here are some before and after shots of the balcony:

Can you tell we haven't been out there for a while?!

Ta-daaaaah!

Those are the outdoor cushions with the covers that I made from the same fabric I made my tote bag with (I made them about a month ago but the weather went bad so we haven't used them outside until now).

That's a little close up of our 'gardening area', all  nice and tidy and spider-free now, thanks to Kevin <3.  Our little bee house is out there, but we still have no takers.  Maybe our super sophisticated new flooring will attract some posh bees...

It's so nice out there now.  The floor makes such a huge difference, and looks way more expensive than it actually is (it cost a total of £101.94), and we can take it with us when we go!  It also needs very little maintenance, just oiling twice a year, which we do with our coffee table and chopping board anyway so it's just an extra thing to add to that list, and it should be quite enjoyable to do on a nice day outside.  It also has the added bonus that we can move it if we need to do any particularly messy jobs outside, such as sanding or spray painting.  All in all I think we've found our perfect floor (can you tell how much we love it?!).

We've been doing lots of other little bits and pieces (and a couple of big bits and pieces) of DIY, some of which should be finished very soon, so we'll have some more updates in a few days (I think I always say that and then don't update for weeks, but I really mean it this time!).  But right now I'm off to bed so I can wake up extra early and have breakfast outside, woo!

If At First You Don't Succeed.... You Suck!

Once again it's my time to make a post. I wouldn't want it to become Ellen & Ellen's DIY Blog now would I. Or would I??

Oddjobs are at it again, I've had so many projects it's unbelievable. Firstly there's the 'Play console games' project, then 'Do nothing' project and somewhere around 19th place is the 'Do DIY!' project.

One particular project I didn't have any success with (I Suck!) was the 'Super Secret' project I had kept from Ellen. Part of her folding chair broke, so I decided to craft some new parts out of wood. Needless to say I didn't have the same tools and it all went horribly wrong. The plus side is that there's now more chunks of firewood available... That was true intention the whole time. Lesson 1 : Bodj Bodj job = Useful material!

The next project was the 'cover-the-horrible-wall-in-the-front-room-corner-with-plaster' project! Granted there are more horriribler walls to choose from but I chose the easiest one. So it went from looking like this:

Urgh, put it away!! My eyes... They be bleedin' !!! 

To this :

 Easy pleasy on the eyes!

To be honest I've no idea why Ellen was scribbling on it with a big white piece of chalk. (What?! She used sanding paper... ON MY WORK?!)  She also prepared the wall's face for a nice splash of makeup. So it went from looking like crap. To looking like the colour of crap. To blue.

 Oh telephone wall socket, you are so shy!

The next thing for me to do in the living room is to make a cover for the hideous gas meter.  Granted there are more hideodously meters to choose from but I chose the easiest only one we've got.

Urgh, cover it up.  My eyes... they just be recovering... now they be burnin' !

I'm about half way through this project so I will be completed in the next few days. Ellen can then paint it and the gasman can struggle the next time he comes to read the meter.  

"Uhhh what meter??  Care for a cup of tea Mr Gasman? I'll ummm just put the kettle on... on... the floor. 'Cause we won't be needing that, because we don't use gas"

The Plants, the Bag and the Wardrobe (not necessarily in that order)

On Tuesday it finally stopped showering for long enough for me to plant up the rest of our new plants, and today I've finally stopped procrastinating for long enough to actually write a post about it.

It took a lot less time than I expected, primarily because I didn't actually have to replant the lavender or the pieris, as the plastic pots they were in fitted perfectly into the decorative pots we already had, so that took all of five minutes.  I did plant the sweet peas in a new pot, complete with trellis jammed in the back for them to climb up.  I've put them all together in one large plant pot, I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not, but I can always move some of them to another pot if it gets too crowded.  Anyway, without further ado, les plants:

Sorry for the close-up-ness of the picture, our balcony's only just over a metre wide so it's the best I could manage.

Progress on the wardrobe is slooooow, mostly due to me.  I thought I was being really clever in painting the back of the doors first so that the front wouldn't be subject to drips coming through when I painted the back.  Except while I was painting the back first, I wasn't checking for drips on the front.  Cue a tonne of drips.  So many I nearly wept, but instead I thought maybe painting over them might make them less obvious.

Long story short, it didn't, so yesterday morning I first tried sanding them down and then when that didn't work I got Kevin's amazing razor scraper and scraped them all off.   Luckily repainting over the bare patches where drips used to be looks way less obvious than the drips did, but it's taken a long time (waiting for coats to dry properly so I don't mess it up again) and I'm a couple of days behind on my plan.  Oh well, I foresee a lot of sanding and painting in the spare room this weekend, and perhaps sometime next week a white wardrobe?  I really hope so!

I also did a little bit of sewing this week, made myself a nice new tote bag using this pattern, from some on sale, super cheap Ikea bed linen (not actual linen, poly cotton, but still).  So that's another thing from my Things to Make and Do board that I've done.  That's two in one week!  Woo!

I'm going to use the rest of the fabric to make some covers for our enormous outdoor cushions, and we're going to Ikea this weekend (Kevin doesn't know this yet, I bet it makes his day, haha) to look at some possible decking for the balcony floor.  All we'll need then is for summer to arrive, and hopefully last longer than two weeks!

I Like My Women Like I Like My Coffee... Covered In Bees!

Now that summer is nearly here we've decided to go gardening crazy!  If only we had a garden *sigh*.  We do have our balcony though, on which many a plant has succumbed to lack of watering / aphids that just won't die.  We were out enjoying the sun a couple of weeks ago (remember that sun... where did it go?) when a lovely fat bumble bee came to visit us.  It was love at first sight for Kevin, who now wants as many as possible to come and enjoy our balcony with us.

To say I'm not very good with plants would be a huge understatement.  Everything that's been out on our balcony has died, and at the moment we have four houseplants, two of which are succulents, and they're only all alive because they're indoors so we notice when they need watering.  So whenever I get all excited and suggest to Kevin that we should get loads of pretty flowers for our balcony he just flat out refuses, which is probably a good thing.  However, now he's all excited about bees, he's the one doing the suggesting, and I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, so on Saturday we spent a couple of hours at our local garden centre looking for some bee friendly plants.

We'd done some highly scientific research beforehand into what would attract bees (i.e. looked on the internet a bit and asked my mum, thanks Mum!) and apparently they like blue flowers, because they can mainly see colours at the blue end of the spectrum.

Anyway, after about an hour-and-a-half wandering around the plant section we came home with these beauties:

• 10 trailing light blue Lobelias
• 6 F1 blue Petunias
• 1 blue Scabiosa
• 1 white and pink Campanula
• 1 purple Sweet Pea
• 1 pink Sweet Pea
• 1 Pieris (forest flame)

The garden centre had very helpfully put some 'Bee Friendly' stickers on some of the plants, and the others we bought because we saw bees landing on them while we were there.

I am madly in love with the Forest Flame (the tall one at the back with the pink leaves).  It's my new favourite thing in the whole flat, so I'm gonna be uber-careful not to kill it!

I planted half of the plants today in two lots of tiered planters.  Space is at a premium on our balcony, so when I saw the idea of making your own tiered planters on this website I pinned it on my things to make and do board, and it's the first thing on there that I've actually done (woo, go me! haha).

I still have the sweet peas and the pieris to plant up tomorrow, along with a gorgeous lavender plant that my mum got us (thanks again Mum!), but without further ado, our new tiered planters:

Bee's-Eye View

The lobelias are in the bottom tier, petunias in the middle and then the scabiosa and campanula in each top pot.  The lobelias are trailing, so hopefully they'll spread out and down over the pot, I'm really excited to see what they look like when the plants are blooming.

I shall post pics of the rest of the plants tomorrow when they're all nicely potted up and I've swept the balcony a bit (compost gets everywhere), and hopefully, possibly, maybe, by the end of this week there may be a white wardrobe in the spare room.  Maybe. 

Jim Morrison Would Be Proud

So, sorry for the lack of updates, but we have been doing lots of DIY, honest!  It's the same job that seems to have been going on for years now (mostly because it has, but that's our fault for stopping and starting all the time), it's the doors.  For such a small flat we seem to have a ridiculous amount of doors.  And of course they all need stripping, sanding and repainting.  Fun.

Well, so far (as in since we moved in!) we've done the two cupboard doors in the bedroom, along with the bedroom door itself.  In progress are:

• the spare room door - stripped;
• the kitchen cupboard door - waiting to be rehung;
• the toilet door - waiting to be rehung;
• the living room to bedrooms door - stripped; and
• the hall to living room door - stripped and half sanded.

We haven't even started on the bathroom door yet, which hopefully may not need sanding, or the utility room door, which we plan to replace entirely with a nice glass-paned door to let more light into the hall.

The weather hasn't been great for sanding for the past week, so whilst I was waiting for more doors to paint I had to look around for something else to get on with that wasn't so major it needed both of us to do it.  Well, I found something.  More doors.  It. Never. Ends.

This time, they're wardrobe doors from the spare room.  There's a built in wooden wardrobe in the corner of the spare room, and while we don't love it, it is very useful, and ripping it out would just be too much of a job for no real pay off (as in we're planning on selling so we don't have any major future plans for the room).

So we decided that the best option would be to paint it, so at least it's not so obvious and orange.

So far I've done the top cupboard doors, thinking they wouldn't take more than a day or two to do.  Not so.  After taking a day to wipe down, sand, wipe down again and then paint six (yes six) coats of paint on the first door I realised that it might take longer than I anticipated.

After the six coat nightmare on the first door (only one side too, mind) I was seeing louvres in my sleep.  I hadn't bothered to use primer on the first go because I'd got a good surface for the paint to adhere to just by sanding, but I decided it was worth a shot.  It stunk to high heaven, but it saved me one coat!

 one down!

So I'm 3/4 the way through the top two small doors, which should be done by tomorrow, and then I can start on the big doors.  Not really looking forward to it, but I know it'll look so much better when it's finished, so I just keep picturing a nice white wardrobe... one day!

wardrobe circa 2025

Ikea Hack Hack Hack Hack Hack

Just thought I'd throw this one in the mix too.

I was so tempted to put it on the end of the other post but that would just be toooo much for a set of eyes to read.

I found this purely by accident when cleaning out the junk spare room.

We had an old window cleaner that we bought from Ikea yonks ago and never got around to using. I decided to put it to good use and make it as a makeshift brush for the dustpan (the other brush fell to pieces from overuse Ha! Ha!) and well what do you know, it sweeps and cleans laminate flooring like a boss.

That's just the chippings of paint from the other door that I'm scraping (yes, I'm still at it) and I used my magnifisplendid new brush to shape it into a pretty good square-ish square.

In my mind that counts as an awesome ingenious Ikea hack and nothing you say can take that away from me. Hold on, the phone's ringing. I'll be right back.

"Hello. Who is this ? ... Ingvar Kamprad you say... Oh..."

Slam dunk the junk!

Well here's another post with updates to a busy DIY schedule.

Let's just say it's slacking. I've been busy with several 'projects' over the past couple of weeks, most of them are really important to the layout and 'one-ness-esses' of the flat. Here is a prime example of the arduous labour I have been exposed to:

That my friend, is a blanking plate that is covering a hole in the kitchen ceiling where the light used to be. I was looking at it and I just had to put the little bugger out of its misery. I did what any normal person would have done and bought a new one scraped it clean to its former rusty looking glory. OH C'MON! It's the scrape king (tightwad) here, what did you expect?!

Yes Cinderella, you shall go to the ball. Well I spruced it up a little bit with some white spray paint (forgot to take a picture of that) and then slotted it back into the ceiling and applied some filler around the edges and voila! The key factor to the kitchen is complete!

So here is the before and after picture

I suppose it would have looked better if I took a closer picture. But I'm sure you get the gist.


Another major project that emerged, from the cold weather we had many many weeks ago, was the cold air infiltrating our WARM fortress.

It was coming from nearly every room. So I cast aside my other DIY and focused on this just so it reduced the energy bill. There was a chill coming from the utility room, bathroom, spare room, bedroom and the living room.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand in the blue corner, Tag Team Champions: The Cold Crew!

Aaaaaaaaaaaand in the red corner, the newcomers: The Foam Fighters!

To cut to the chase, Biff! Baff! Boff!, the foam won.

Then it hit me after all the cold weather had gone and the sunshine started to roll in through the window. It ain't half hot in here. It seems I just clogged up the supply of cool air flowing through. Oh well, better open these clear doors attached to the side of the flat.


The last thing we've done recently is to clear the junk spare room of anything we didn't need. It was an epic journey to the tip. Cardboard, crap, clutter and cots of caint... err Pots of Paint!!

So it went from looking like a crapstorm had thrown a party in the room:

To something that looked like a crapstorm had a fleeting visit. Hi! Bye!:

Believe it or not, there is a system working here. I'll let you know what it is when I receive the memo....